first thought though is that Badiou's opening sounds reasonable when you know Finkielkraut is coming after, or at least one feels one is churlish to complain, but what he says really belongs to the world of stirring novels and films where reality is simply there to represent themes - even "France" is pretty tenuous as a referent for his statements - and can't be taken seriously.

its very disturbing that in some sense - I say it hesitantly - Finkielkraut is pointing out the real problem with Badiou's divinised, maximally abstract, non-existent "France" which he fills with principles never applied - and this is why they are loveable precisely, because they are never manifest, his France is the scene of nobody's equality - the object of love. The battle of the chauvinists.

the main thing that emerges is how they complement one another so perfectly; the "universalism" appoints these two bourgeois Frenchmen to discuss among themselves - so politely, with so much really in common - the fates of others, who are kept out. Together they work to fashion the spectrum and to mutually affirm their authority, their own titles to France and France's titles and property, and to confirm the deepest of imperialist and white supremacist beliefs, that to claim something for France - a person, a mineral mine, an island - is an act of the greatest generosity and of course a compliment.

it's a little amazing that Finkielkraut is not even satisfied by the agreement on "new fascism"...he doesn't think Badiou blames the new fascists enough for their fascism and wants to finger the liberal anti-totalitarian revisionists for the trend across the board.

OT, except I was just writing how I thought Badiou conceded a lot there at the end with his symmetry of crazies in Israel/Palestine - of course on a show like this it's very delicate after he's been attacked for his essay on "the word Jew" etc etc, and with Finkielkraut who cries anti-semite all the time - but really since he is the fellow "universalism" has nominated here to defend the Palestinian victims of Israeli colonialism and racism, since no Palestinians have been asked to rebut Finkielkraut and the task falls to him, he should at least have refused the rhetoric of "both sides have maniacs" etc.. to which he is led, admittedly, by idealism rather than apology.

But jeez louise i don't think even an apologist can make that case again after such a thing. This is straight up Nazism.

that to claim something for France - a person, a mineral mine, an island - is an act of the greatest generosity and of course a compliment.

But isn't that the same way I benefit from Wendy Brown's subjectivity? I mean the way the blessings accrue, even though I still haven't watched the clip, and just take your word for the fact that she claims to have a gifted subjectivity. (couldn't resist, sorry.)

Together they work to fashion the spectrum and to mutually affirm their authority, their own titles to France and France's titles and property, and to confirm the deepest of imperialist and white supremacist beliefs, that to claim something for France - a person, a mineral mine, an island - is an act of the greatest generosity and of course a compliment.

I don't think this is really fair to Badiou's philosophy - which is all about breaking away from the official state of things - or his actual politics, but yes, it is what makes his debate with F. not his best moment - he isn't his complement, but cannot avoid being framed that way. (I do like it that he calls F. the enemy at the end of part 4, when he quotes Mao.)

yes and the woman behind Finkielkraut isn't just white but decidedly a french de souche type too.

This it total bullshit. To read this sort of total crap is to know what 'your sort of people' are like. Really you should both be ashamed. And who says the black woman is 'beautiful'? Maybe I don't think so. Maybe I don't even think she's 'black'. Why don't we discuss the meanings of the word 'negritude' and the subtleties of 'du souche'.

This is really loathsome, esp. when those who have determined that there is 'no race' seem to know what 'du souche' is without googling, as I did. Does that mean mulatto? Or is the English word too 'harsh'. Or is she a Creole from one of the ethnically cleansed regions. Fuck this shit.

I think she's beautiful and if you believe it's an accident that there's a beautiful girl from the audience in the frame you don't watch a lot of tv. From there it is only a very small step to assume that the people who selected the audience also thought about the subject of the discussion (French identity).

I happen to think she's beautiful, too, but so what? I watch no TV, but placing beautiful people anywhere is always done, and not because of 'French identity', because it's done for everything. That's why you've got no point with the 'beautiful black' and the 'white woman du souche'.

When I used to see Italian news back in 2003-2004, literally all of the newscasters, male and female, were knockouts, more than on the France 2. All nations, all ethnicities, prize their beauties, no matter what their official line is. And they all have standards as to what this 'beauty' is.

Curiously, in the U.S., the newscasters are not nearly always such obvious knockouts.

QlipD - agreed; but this is why the roadshwo with Finkielkraut is very problematic - it is Finkilekraut benefitting from this, because he was once a kind of lefty guy but in recent years he has been thoroughly discredited, he's completely racist and crazy. So what is Badiou doing in this duet with him? They are just mutually promoting. And Finkielkraut comes out better than he would against any other leftist because he does not contest any of the territory of history, effectively. Badiou is about the only declared leftist against whom a crazed tribalist like Finkielkraut could win any debating points at all, because of what DuncanLaw notices here

http://duncanlaw.wordpress.com/2010/05/18/badious-saint-paul/

So even a maniac like Finkielkraut has a few things over Badiou. And so these contests are not doing anyone any good.

Enemy, yes, but paysan. This is troubling too.

patrick - you're kidding I hope?

As for Wendy Brown's gifts, no, she just doesn't seem to realise she is the ideal subject for neoliberalism, capital loves her, showers rewards on her, but she seems to think she's free as a boid, a completely free spirit, none of whose actions is in the least influenced by say her situaton as vendor of intellectual property.

I dunno Patrick, I have been an extra a few times and compared to the bizar reasonings according to which we were moved around, using a black face as decor in a discussion of national identity strikes me as quite straightforward. Look how she is foregrounded at around 7:15, when Finkielkraut has his rhetorical climax about immigrants refusing the French heritage.

Arpege, the joke about Wendy Brown was just because I enjoyed your remark on how she might think her 'subjectivity' benefitted people without her bank account, very New Agey, e.g., 'be glad for someone else's good', etc., even if it's a palazzo. They go too far with that, but I don't care if someone has a palazzo. The whole point is the idea that one's subjectivity benefits those outside it--it does, if the person lives vicariously instead of his own life.

Well, yes, but you still are agreeing that these choices of 'beauties' are 'beauties' by the same standards of the people you are opposed to, the systems you are opposed to. That's what I meant when I said 'maybe I don't think she's beautiful' (even though I do, and I don't care if they put her there to be decorative, and if you think 'decorative' is part of 'french identity', you would be right; it's a part of every 'national identity', they just have different tastes, etc.,)

I knew a woman who used to actually get hired to sit in audiences - she did that show they shoot on faubourg saint honoré and several others. she was also hired to laugh.

But that's the same age-old tradition of the claque. I think it still exists at La Scala, and opera stars hire people themselves. They were talking about it on the ballet board, I think ballet stars do it too. Big deal. The quest for purity again. You know, you can't get the purity anywhere, whether in ladies with their condemnation of Valenti's dildoes or getting any kind of televised production not somehow arranged. I know what you mean, though, you just think they could have chosen to signify something else. Well, yes, I wouldn't have cared if they'd had homely people behind either man, they have homely people in town meetings and presidential debates, and one astute commentator wrote of the old Bush/Kerry debates that when Kerry said 'It looks to me like it's just the three of us [including Charlie Gibson] who are among those who benefit from the unfair tax cuts', said 'well, how was he judging this, by their clothes?' It hadn't helped that he'd said he 'married up'.

I mean, I get that Badiou is picking out Finkielkraut as the proponent of an Enlightenment Universalism who is clearly a racist lunatic. So he's the guy Badiou doesn't want to be mistaken for, he wants to lay out how his universalism isn't the same. Now he's not the same person as Finkielkraut, but his universalism is in fact the same. It is a tradition they both have inherited and Badiou hasn't the power to change it, to create meaning and history from nothing with a snap of his fingers. Obviously he doesn't like trains to the velodrome full of undermen (neither does Finkielkraut), so for Badiou that's simply not part of the "France" he loves. But it is part of the only France that actually exists. What he winds up having to do is say 'my fantasy trumps your history'; and that is the traditional - truly, hoary old traditional - assertion of the inheritors of this ideology of "universalism".

Nope, not convinced. There are a number of attractive women, and the black one, while also attractive, is not quite what I'd call a 'beauty' in the exreme sense. Remember that picture of Chavez with the mother suckling her infant. Just in terms of stereotyped 'looks', she was more the obvious 'beauty'. But this isn't serious. I don't know what you mean, though, by the Frenchwoman behind Finkelkraut, she was just a nice-looking no-nonsense girl who probably is very pretty when she smiles. You know, like so, but you know more about setting up these things than I do, down to Babs Walters poinsettias to interview Angela Lansbury, the poor thing. I guess I think you read a few too many things into those details, because I didn't saw only one guy who qualified as maybe 'plain', but all the women looked about equally attractive to me, maybe the black woman a little more immediately striking, but not quite stunning like, say, Beyonce, or Halle Berry, if we want to get really vulgar about these things.

clearly finkielkraut is much worse but there are not much of an alternative presented by these two. that's really the problem is presenting them as the spectrum, when they are very close to eachother on so much, A and C, not A and Z.

patrick - the face behind badiou is objectively beautiful. you're just being contrary.

No, I'm not, and you have no right to make such a pronouncement, as if your own subjectivity (which determining what 'objectively beautiful' ultimately is) were just as beneficial to me as Wendy's is. But. Give. You. Credit. I wouldn't know how much I was benefitting from Wendy's solipsism if you hadn't told me. It's like they shouldn't say on the web how easy it is to make bombs, the terrorists will all figure it out that way (lol).

Who says I don't know from 'objectively beautiful'. I said that mother in the photo you posted with Chavez was as close as I could get to 'objectively beautiful' that we both had looked at closely besides this one, and don't think your hero Chavez didn't notice that too!

You just want me to become an EXPLICIT feminist, and you know perfectly well I'm not constitutionally capable of it. I'm as AWFOOOOL a chauvinist as Badiou!

then i thought you were wanting an elaboration to the side of the joke!

Now that you bring it up, I wouldn't mind. After all, it's only because of you that I've gotten such pleasure from the idea of her 'beneficial subjectivity'. I mean, I don't know from Wendy Fucking Brown, and she's been forced to share her wealth with me, even though I'm not sure it's durable goods yet. I'm waiting...

Among the intolerable declarations which followed the events of November 2005, those of the essayist Alain Finkielkraut stand out particularly. The more generous spoke of skidding out of control [dérapages]. But to skid one still has to be on the road. In any case, Finkielkraut has never made any secret of his views. Why would he bother? In France, to declare oneself a racist carries no penalties because no group of persons could be targeted a priori by such a declaration. This is not the case if you announce you are an anti-semite. Finklielkraut's tactic is to give it to be understood that he is Jewish as a shield for his statements and to expose his adversaries to the charge of antisemitism. So far this form of terrorism has worked very well and no one has dared to contradict him.

In his broadcast Qui vive, March 6, 2005 on RCJ, the Jewish community radio, Finkielraut, explicitly invoking Olivier Pétré-Grenouileau, lamented that some "stirred up youth" [jeunes excités], five days before in Martinique, had attacked Dieudonné, who "had no need of this to play two evenings of sold out performances before a enthusiastic crowd, antillian victims of slavery who live today on handouts [de l'assistance] from the metropole."

On the 13th of March, Finkielkraut, on the pretext of returning to these remarks that were particularily wounding to Martinicans, added on the same station, "I didn't mean to say that the Antilliais are assistés ...This aide exists and it is legitimate. But that the beneficiaries make the delusional case about a France still enslaving [escalvagiste] and still colonialist, that, no!" He added that "the Antillais are in bad ideological shape."

In an interview published in Haaretz on 17 Nov 2005, four days after Carrère d'Encausse and still practising the same astute technique of confidences made in a foreign language and publication to escape French laws, AF went much further, "People want to reduce the riots in the banlieues to their social dimension, and see in them a revolt of youth against unemployment and discrimination. The problem is that most of them are blacks and Arab, with a muslim identity....It is clear that we are faced with a revolt of ethno-religious character." He continued: "Is the crisis in the banlieues a reaction to the racism of which the victims are blacks and Arabs?I don't think so. People tell us that the national French football team is admired for being black-blanc-beur....In fact, today, it is black black black, people make fun of us for it across Europe."

These statements were not without follow ups as one year later, George Frêche, socialist president of Languedoc-Rousillon, after having referred to harkis as "sous-hommes", without much reaction from his party, would in turn publicly lament the manner in which the French national side is composed: "Soon enough there will be eleven out of eleven blacks! It is a catastrophe for French sport!"

At the time of his remarks in the Israeli press in November 2005, invoking Dieudonné whom he seemed to confuse with Christiane Taubira, Finkielkraut added: "instead of combatting his discourse, we do just what he asks: we change the way the history of colonialism and slavery is taught in schools. We teach that there were only negatives and not that the colonial project meant the education and the bringing of culture to savages. [sauvages]"

What is a savage? The opposite of Alain Finkielkraut, as he goes on to explain; "I was born in Paris but I am the son of Polish immigrants. My father was deported from France. His parents were deported and killed at Auschwitz. My father returned from Auschwitz to France. This country merits our hatred: what it did to my parents was much more violent than what it did to Africans. What did this country do to Africans? Nothing but good. To my father, it made him endure five years of hell. Nonetheless I was never raised with hatred; And today this hatred that blacks feel is even greater than that of the Arabs."

On November 28, invited to the France Culture morning show by Nicholas Demorand, Finkielkraut evoked an "inferiorisation" [inférioritsation] prior to colonisation and declared, with the confidence of someone who knows what he is talking about, that "the hatred of the black, it is the hatred of he who believes himself to be nothing, that he is absolutely nothing, that there is nothing in his past or his present that he can overcome."

So alain Badiou chooses to publicly argue with Alain Finkielkraut about which are the most solid bases of French greatness and glory and how precisely the colonied and imperialised benefitted from French creativity and the spiritual and intellectual excellence of French property owners. It seems like a questionable endeavour altogther.

also, about his evocation of Mao, this makes sense if Badiou is the mystical embodiment of the People, like a sacred king. Because he doesn't have a following, he's not, like Mao, the leader of a mass movement. He's not even a member of a mass movement. He's quite eccentric, even his admirers don't really agree with his views of history and politics. More importantly, their performance bars from entry all those people who could legitimately carry on a dispute among the people, all those militants who do represent constituencies and are supported and accepted as spokespersons and leadership by considerable parts of the population and who take a confrontational stance toward the enemy reactionary new philosophes. In framing his dispute with Finkielkraut in such a way as to cast himself as representative of the People, Badiou obviously voices a sincere belief that he knows what's best for everyone and can represent Palestinians etc better than they could defend themselves (since he's already implicated many in new fascism, which can't be a good thing), but the point is only this closure of the scene, and this gentleman's agreement between these two members of the ruling elite to treat one another as legitimately holding the podium and having the benefit of the doubt as to purity of motive and sincerity etc, can create this kind of reassuring illusion - here it is, national tv, and everyone on the planet who could be concerned by French policy is there, equally represented. no one is excluded because Badiou is there and he's the mystical embodiment of humanity.

Okay if you say so but why does he pose, in his dialogue with Finkielkraut, as a devotee of the universalism of which France, he claims; was made a repository by Rousseau, Voltaire Diderot and the authors of the '93 constitution and declaration? He sounds perfectly sincere to me there and goes on at length to identify what he means by universalism and who invented it and why it's especially French and the essence of Frenchness in contrast to all this inauthentic stuff Finkielkraut evokes.

That he says something different in his books read by 40 people and understood by 12 doesn't really impact on what he's doing and saying here in front of an audience of millions, does it?

I'm sympathetic to all this heroic stuff - I am a fan of Dumas - I like this kind of stuff whether its royalist or blue, as storytelling. of course. when I was little I thought of saint just like a rock star. It was very painful to me to learn that the Jacobins were not the heroic communists I had imagined, that they tortured and terrorised the uprising slaves, that they repressed the sans culottes, etc.. I wanted them to be just what Badiou claims they were. His views though are as fallacious and fantastical as Dominique de Villepin's Napoleon hero-worship.

but he actually says France never recognised the equality of women with men, just that all of humanity were equal. Women were always subordinate to humanity! And so what? (He says this, and they show a woman in a niqab on their cube!)

This is simply why he has to chat forever with Alain Finkielkraut instead of engaging with the active left which have different kinds of disagreements with him. This is why he had to insinuate to the German feminist that she really was basically a Nazi-in-the-making. Then he doesn't have to really respond or think about what she said. He and Alain Finkielkraut, protected from intrusions, can go on forever discussing all of us fascists - the feminazis, the islamofascists, the anti-imperialantiracistfascists - very harmoniously. They argue about a narrow range of things, basically their feelings about the symbols.

also I may be misremembering, but i think his pute jokes - opportunistic use of easy ways to humiliate women - illustrate the same tendencies that are on display in the way he imagines the Paris Commune. There is a very consistent historical revisionism with a consistent ideological tendency (white male supremacist). The revisionism is in the service of a transparent preference for a masculist heroic mythology, from his complaints about Soboul, Mathiez and Lefebvre for their insufficient hero-worship to his hero-worship of Sartre, Althusser and Lacan; his main targets are leftists of genuine democratic and egalitarian tendency.

Isn't Dominic de Villepin the one with the objectively beautiful face, which Sarkozy also has, but in a 'different mode'.

The following are the best paragraphs I've ever arisen to:

"So alain Badiou chooses to publicly argue with Alain Finkielkraut about which are the most solid bases of French greatness and glory and how precisely the colonied and imperialised benefitted from French creativity and the spiritual and intellectual excellence of French property owners. It seems like a questionable endeavour altogther."

That's because the French never contributed anything to world culture that was really distinguished except Francophilia. In this, they are superior to the English, who at least contributed the Royal Family of the sort that wouldn't get the axe in the Place de la Concorde, and the Italians had 'Musetta's Waltz'. But Francophilia is the greatest of all national subjectivities, because it attracts devotees the world over for its exclusiveness and snobbish attitude. This is why people used to dress in leather to go to hear Jacques Derrida talk about masturbation and why it was 'especially dangerous' (well, it is if you can't do it.)

"here it is, national tv, and everyone on the planet who could be concerned by French policy is there, equally represented. no one is excluded because Badiou is there and he's the mystical embodiment of humanity."

Yes, the Badioudian subjectivity is bigger than the Wendy Brown Subjectivity, and therefore has better trickle-down effects in the Reaganomics sense. Certainly is better than Zizek's sweating, that's for sure, btw, you know, Badiou has rather an 'objectively beautiful face', 'tis a pity he won't lose some weight. Of course, he's not really HOT like Deleuze was, that's the only philosophe with Le Sex Appeal...

Good morning, mlle., you are the best read, I do swear it. I even believe what you said about the equivalencies of Judaism and Islam.

and qlippy d of course i see the appeal - me, white joo from NY, upper west side origin, half litvak half glitziana, red diaper, ethical culture school, ivy league, whjo is more universal than I? Who is the moire rightfdul heiress of Truth and Reason?

thank god somebody sat me down and explained. People have to get other views, they have to listen and try to learn. At least to try. But Badiou just reacts like a bully when anybody tries to explain anything about the narrowness and particularity of his perspective. He acts like knowing math makes everything you know and think you know math.

red diaper - right, my father and his parents were DeLeonists. We had a bust of Deleon and a bust of Lenin in our living room. Lenin broke but I still have Deleon. They were, recall, from Brownsville not Brooklyn Heights! My intro to Marxism where these smelly old pamphlets such as "The Socialist Reconstruction of Sassiety".

that was a type but yes right - goodt dto know. This consonant-chewing accent hugs with the greatest affection words endting (ent -dink?) in "tion" and even better, "ction", and "age." Action, reaction, intellection, cognition, recognition, construction, defection, rejection, legitimization, reportage, verbiage, cellarage, vassalage, rummage, damage, . (Reportich, verbi-ich, cellarich, vassalich, rummich, damich, adich, bondich, ). The accent clings to and supports a kind of very dry delivery that exaggerates the insider feeling; even giving a sense of wit that is just as allusion to shared heritage. (Heritich.)

so this is how far backwards things have travelled, to the late 19th century now. This is why you can write about dubious Armenians in the NLR and nobody bats an eyelash - because this is where things stand. Nearly a hundred celebrated intellectuals have to explain, TWICE!, to the editor of the London Review of Books - not coincidentally a regular Zizz publisher of course, he created the conditions at the paper for this - that straightforward analogies between black people and baboons are offensive.

This has to be laboriously explained, and even when it is, the explanation is rejected with the utmost indifference. It is only accepted because again relentlessly explained, by celebrated black intellectuals, figures as imposing as Paul Gilroy and Caryl Phillips. The editor of the London Review of Books has to have Caryl Phillips' affirmation of the explaination made to her before she can understand some very straightfoward writing and concede it is offensive and in a specific way.

There is brain damage happening. Genuinely Orwellian effects of the mass media are visible in people more and more. And then there's so much dishonesty that supports it - she just looked at the article and even when any possible period of genuine obliviousness had passed continued to say "no it doesn't say that", just like with the "alternative schedule" or Zizz' anti-semitic (anti jewish, anti arab) writings in the New Statesman and New York Times; the editors just insist there are three lights not two, either as torturers or torturees.

And now those who successfully objected at last are asking how how how did this happen?

where have they been? it didn't come out of the blue my goodness! do they read this publication? and others like it?

Patrick, I don't want to pull rank by referring to a useless media studies degree, or the fact that I know a lot of people who work in media- but I guess I have nothing but these things to go on here:

There is a very slim likelihood that the placement of this "racially ambiguous" (see that Kotex commercial I posted a while ago) and also eye-catchingly beautiful woman is a "mistake" or incidental. Especially given that the shot is obviously framed with extreme care in order to include her face whenever Badiou is shown- his chair is somewhat oddly placed and his body is turned just right so it never moves to obscure her face. She also sits perfectly, almost uncomfortably still through most of the debate.

I also noticed that she was trying very hard not to smack on her gum at several points. I mean, really, I've seen paid escorts feign more interest in what they're doing. She's of course probably an actual student, or maybe a friend of the producer's, or something. She maybe even asked to be there, and was enthralled- I can't speak to her actual state of mind, though she looks bored stiff. But regardless, she was carefully placed by producers.

You're right that this happens all the time in TV- but if we can't even have an "intellectual debate" without relying on these kinds of manipulative tactics- the overly convenient 'diversity' at just the right moment, the front row all women and the back rows all men- well, then when can we reliably escape this shit?

It doesn't really detract from the content of what's being said, but it does frame the exchange itself in a rather unfortunate manner.

Haven't read through all of the comments yet, just wanted to answer Patrick's comments.

The novel Cambridge was really celebrated and had considerable impact of post-modern historical novels in English; his other stuff has had less influence but is very good. I especially like The Nature of Blood.

Well, what's funny about all of the math=ontology talk is that none of it is actually cosigned by any working mathematicians (afaik, anyway). I don't doubt that he knows what he's talking about, formally, but my own limited knowledge of math throws up a lot of red flags when I read the equivalences being made. Especially when one realizes one must eventually make the logical leap between numbers (what you might call 'pure' concepts) and people (not pure concepts) in order for any of Badiou's mathematical work to apply to human lives or events involving humans. Another strange Badiouvian equivalence I've seen made is that 0 in math stands for 'inexistence' in some abstract sense. But the way I've heard it taught, 0 is a concept that stands for 1 + (-1), formally.

On top of that, of all of the math to rely on, set theory seems an odd choice. You don't need to understand Heyting algebra to realize that one can arrange and rearrange concepts into lists and put brackets around them. This is a completely common sense intuition that gets played up into a grand justification- and it's never really clear to me what it's justifying. I own LoW and BaE, and they both read like the notebooks of someone sort of seized with this idea, someone who studied set theory and thought it would be a good basis for a theory of how things are organized, a way to clean things up until not even language remained. But all of this is sort of banal if you realize that OF COURSE math describes the "logic of worlds", it's a conceptual system that was developed to explain the world. Advanced mathematics especially have developed alongside technology and with solid and clear reference to the empirical world/s around us.

This brings me to my next gripe: I also can't stand the Badiouian opposition of "empirical" and "scientific"- where math is supposed to be the only true "science" because some people without a firm grasp of the history or development of math imagine that math happens in a vacuum and doesn't refer to those dirty, fithy physical things that we are forced to empirically interact with (sensing a theme here? man/human, humanity/universal, sensual things/particular... these are the oldest, most cliched associations and the basis of all kinds of historical oppression). This charge is also, funnily enough, made by someone who is clearly no scientist and seems to have no understanding of what the word means to people who actually practice it.

In this, as in so many other things, the Badiouian emphasis is on pure, Platonic ideas/concepts versus praxis, with the implication being that praxis can only ever muddy the otherwise clean conceptual waters. You almost get the sense that bringing up praxis is very unwelcome around these people. It's like they're saying "ugh, stop, you're ruining my fantasies!" I don't get what the (limited) appeal of this stuff is.

This London Review of Books that has so shocked shocked readers with racist material - yes racist, people compared to baboons, not said to be "half-ape" but shown to be similar to baboons and dogs - is usually such a wonderfully entertaining paper.

here's from my archive, a favourite piece:

For Kant, even more important than the – often bloody – reality of what went on on the streets of Paris was the enthusiasm that the events in France gave rise to in the eyes of sympathetic observers all around Europe and in places as far away as Haiti, where it triggered another world-historical event: the first revolt by black slaves.[sic] Arguably the most sublime moment of the French Revolution occurred when the delegation from Haiti, [sic]led by Toussaint l’Ouverture, [sic]visited Paris [sic] and were enthusiastically received [sic] at the Popular Assembly [sic] as equals among equals.

Oh what a sublime night it was too. I recall it as if it were yesterday. Was it yesterday? My twisting plastic greenglo necklace still shines.

The best part was when Toussaint said for the third time "Nobody expects the Haitian Revolution! Our principle weapon is surprise..." Un. For. Gettable.

Such a wonderful publication, I'm sure they'll recover from their little gaffe.

what's funny about all of the math=ontology talk is that none of it is actually cosigned by any working mathematicians (afaik, anyway)

yes he's platonist genuinely. But at first I thought okay, it's not really a metaphor, he's really doing epistemology and ontology has to have quotes "ontology"=math; but then when he does start to try to work this idea of Event as a pattern, with a precausal event of sorts (sequence is Event then fidelity then subjectivity, but it turns out the sequence of production is not like this but subjectivity then fidelity then Event) the set theory becomes just the kind of metaphor everyone claims and he claims it is not (he claims he means this "literally" and for a time this is kind of sustained but then it falls into metaphor of the flimsy expected kind.)

But this too is all about his white supremacist universalism - everything depends on the set and "the situation" being produyced by his own POV and that of his fellow members of the ruling French elite. His example of what 'does not exist" or has a weak existence is a lot of people, just about everyone except wealthy white people like himself. So how does all humanity basically not exist, need an event to beceome existent? Just because his recognition (or his as representative of rich white folks) and their existence are the same thing. In math this isn't a problem- the mathematician recognises all the mathematical objects (encountered and yet to be encountered) and that's that. For Badiou all humanity could be in fact enjoying liberty, political equality and fraternity in 1793 because those whom we might consider human didn't exist, or not as such, for those who count and determine these things, and their heirs - Badiou - continue to validate retroactively their perception (the only subjectivity there is.)

I forgot to add "sensual things/impure", "human/pure", and "woman/particular"... but I'm sure you see where I'm going with that.

exactly, and then it gets explicit in the nutty acolytes, these "spec realists" who are basically like medievals. They really bring back the idea of the homunculus. Their Thought, the jouissance of their Thought is this infinitely magical creative stuff, this male stuff, "information", intellect, and its planted in a field of despicable perishable flesh.

I've pondered this, obviously there's a diversity but I think one thing is everyone is very depressed and discouraged. And finally this stuff says we are living in communist paradise RIGHT NOW. In principle. In the abstract everything is great. We're all equal "in principle" - the facts are details. We're immortal, or the faithful are, those who have been saved. Nothing is wrong or unpleasant in the world except in the details. Your spiritual state is all that counts -faith. This is christianity - we have at once some nbad things we should try to alleviate but "faith not works" saves us and remember, we're already all saved and in paradise. jesus already died for our sins. It happened, Paradise is regained.

Then like two of his heros (not Sartre), his scheme helps with academic production, makes it faster and easier because historiography is the hard time-consuming thing, and finding the Pope in the Pizza is quick. Not his mathy stuff, but in the political essays he dispenses with any criteria; he treats history as entirely flexible and faith-based (he's a radical sceptic like Nietzsche or Hayden White on human history actually. And "the Event" is a meme - people who never read Badiou can add it to their products to puff them out and spiff them up and make platitudes sound abstruse and "theorised".

But I think for people who like puzzles and math, who like formalising, who find that kind of reassuring (something messy and mysterious like "the Bolshevik Revolution" becomes something very simple and manageable and as replicable as a geometric figure) it's actually just interesting and fun.

I got really caught up in Being and Event while reading. Wasn't at all persuaded by the case about human affairs but was really entertained and gripped by the way the argument unfolds and learning a lot and even fascinated in a way the text was trying to resist people becoming fascinated - fascinated like a celebrity tight rope walk, to see when he would fall off these different wires. And it's weirdly inviting to a deManian deconstructon precisely because the math has this unique status, ambiguity-free. But is it really? It could be infinitely ambiguous (it should be, if after all that's "being" and "beings"; but probably that's no macguffin).

"But this too is all about his white supremacist universalism - everything depends on the set and "the situation" being produyced by his own POV and that of his fellow members of the ruling French elite."

Yes, exactly. Sets don't arrange themselves. This is why I think relying on set theory is so strange- of all math you could possibly choose, this is probably the worst when it comes to untainted objectivity or conceptual purity (at least, when used as a way to understand human interactions). That's because sets don't make themselves; in order to explain the world using sets, someone has to do the arranging, it's a person who decides which trait/s organize, for example, "feminists" into a set. Or let's say "men" or "Jews" or "blacks". But as biology and these other evil empiricisms have amply demonstrated, who counts as a "man" can be far from self-evident. Race also is a way of organizing people into sets that have no biological basis, no basis in the Real: there is nothing that makes someone 'black', only people who are all related to varying degrees who have traits that they may or may not share with other population groups, and which shift each generation. Unless Badiou is suggesting that we all get to run around arranging things into sets as we personally see fit, until the world follows logically from them, then his position is quite frightening to me. It seems to rely on this idea that the Philosopher is the arbiter of the absolute and the Real's psychic medium, because, well, who else gets to decide who goes in which sets?

For example, this quote of Badiou's that I gleaned from the following article:

http://www.marxists.org/archive/bensaid/2004/xx/badiou.htm

Philosophy appears here as a ‘wager endowed with a universal bearing’, at each step coming up against either ‘a specialized and fragmentary world’ in the catastrophic form of religious, communitarian or national passion – claims according to which only a woman can understand a woman, only a homosexual can understand a homosexual, only a Jew can understand a Jew, and so on. If every universal first subsists in a singularity, and if every singularity has its origin in an event then ‘universality is an exceptional result originating in a single point, it is the consequence of a decision, a way of being rather than knowing.

This really sounds strange to me, as if he's trying to reclaim the authority to speak about and on behalf of others was a white male entitlement. Things have gotten very out of hand, so chaotic, and need to be tidied up. It seems like his entire project is founded on what Kpunk has called elsewhere a sense of "wounded entitlement", where he's making a stance, saying: "Enough already, we're taking back our authority. If we want to decide what makes a Jew a Jew, we will!" Anything that questions the absolute determinacy of the "sets" people have already decided upon, any thinking that would prefer to leave room for radical indeterminacy and human disinclusion in things like sets, is disdained and called post-modernism. But then, set theory is introduced as some kind of answer to the tendency of people to hate outgroups. It's nonsensical.

And honestly, I find it quite scary- I don't think the universalists intend to come across this way, but they do nevertheless.

"Enough already, we're taking back our authority. If we want to decide what makes a Jew a Jew, we will!"

Yes exactly. This is funny because an overt Zizzy thing -

"To be clear and brutal to the end, there is a lesson to be learned from Hermann Goering's reply, in the early 1940s, to a fanatical Nazi who asked him why he protected a well-known Jew from deportation: 'In this city, I decide who is a Jew!'... In this city, it is we who decide what is left, so we should simply ignore liberal accusations of inconsistency."

But for Badiou, his concern is how people are going to come to exist, and there is a sense of self-solace in his deciding that people who are suffering don't exist - that this is the way he wants to express how people he feels for are suffering. He's not callous at all, it's not that. This has some mysterious appeal. I have to think it is comforting somehow - a kind of controlled solipsism.

it is interesting how Badiou and Badiouvians like to blame Gayatri Spivak for everything. Like they keep saying her Levinasian other thing with the subaltern "prevents" that universal solidarity and unity eyc. I want to say - well, ignore her and do that thing you say you can do! Because she actually does accomplish some things for the poorest women on earth, and they don't accomplish anything. And then it's like well her evil eye is stopping us! this one woman of a certain age, with the power of her thoughts, is destroying all their excellent male powers to improve the lot of the poorest women in the world. So what was the problem before Spivak got famous? And what will be the excuse when she dies?

It can't be that the 8000 people who actually read a work of Levinas this decade are the wrench in the universalist revolutionary works.

And this goes back to the show. he accepts from Finkielkraut the "problem" that is "Islamism" as self-evident, then he says, well, its from the collapse of the Marxist left in these regions, and the pattern is familiar enough, like fascism in the 30s. That's reasonable enough in its way, he can't be detailed in this situation though he should make some distinctions between US paramilitary terrorists, US client monarchies, and popular movements hwoever they started or were funded, but there's no time for that, okay; and the French audience is smarter about "fascism" than in the anglophone world, it's not just a cuss word, so fine, but just leaving this "the collapse of Marxism" like that, like a ceiling plaster fell, or it was some kind of natural erosion...that's just over the line into not-helpful-at-all. and I feel a big thing there is he doesn't really ever want to discuss imperialism in a serious and detailed way, in an historical way. He really loves these sumplifications, where everything is a kind of comic book struggle, this extreme voluntarism that cannot tell its narrative if the reality of history is acknowledged. So there is the collapse of marxism and the rise of Islamism as a kind of substitute like fascism, just as one might say so the wise king grew old and his dopey son started running the court....people do age. His trope of the "political sequence" boils down much to this basically, people age, things get stale, just how it goes.

"He's not callous at all, it's not that. This has some mysterious appeal. I have to think it is comforting somehow - a kind of controlled solipsism."

Yes, I always get the sense that this is very sincere and well-meaning. There's also the harmless way in which it functions as a self-esteem building exercise for people whose discipline of choice is considered a academic dinosaur (theology, even, looks like it will have more of a promising future).

If only people were being rallied to actually get things done on the ground, to live by their principles (which on a personal level are probably very sound) instead of retreating from any interaction with "others" who demand to be treated with respect, I'd have more sympathy towards the whole project.

(I do understand the appeal of the formal mathematical stuff- I love that kind of thing, myself- but I think it's being used as a little bit of an "abracadabra!" to transform somewhat strained mystifications into sparkling brilliance. And it works because so few people have the education necessary to understand the math...)

Because the real history of imperialism might interfere with his patriotism and the "universalism" as ecstasy it causes, and because it requires recognising levels of complexity greater than the Dumas novel account of Events in Paris which is the necessary atmosphere for his voluntarism.

"instead of retreating from any interaction with "others" who demand to be treated with respect, I'd have more sympathy towards the whole project."

yeah, it doesn't really appeal to me, but this is the worst aspect is how it just fits in with the zizzianism. But then if you glance over the history you can see zizek colonising badiou; he always misquotes and misrepresents him in the US as an anti-Semite - he always fudges and is slippery and leaves the impression that Badiou believes Jews "have to disappear" for humanity to be free. This is of course not at all what he wrote in his "controversial" essay, which in any case was really the first steps of this now duet, this permaent polemic on the road, with Finkielkraut.

"It can't be that the 8000 people who actually read a work of Levinas this decade are the wrench in the universalist revolutionary works."

Heh. Seriously.

Levinas is no freedom fighter when it comes to women's rights, either. If you look at his stuff it has a lot of broad strokes, Lacanian-sounding talk about woman. Isn't it Levinas who says that the basis of ethics is in welcoming the stranger into the home, a sort of Biblical notion that doesn't seem all that off-base, and that therefore ethics begins with "woman" (who makes a "home", obvs- which kinda ruins it)? A lot of his stuff is very... well, stream-of-consciousnessy and has a poetic versus the philosopher's typically prosaic style, so I could be remembering vague impressions rather than textual certainties.

Anyway, yeah, I do see where they get off blaming Levinas on anything, or looking down haughtily at people who take cues from him.

I don't love Levinas either - and haven't read much (only to understand the derrida and the spivak really)...Spivak is not guilty of everything these guys are, and I think she adopted them as investments in her career - she does always finally, for all her presentation drama, refuse and resist the function of the bourgeois intellectual when it comes to its status quo justifying role. I am often frustrated by her writing but she's always scapegoated for Derrida and DeMan and deconstruction and she is the best of them all politically and as a reader of literature. By far. She is scapegoated for the sins of her whole intellectual set because of her gender and race, quite simply. The Badiouvians perform such reverence for their intellectuaml opponents who are white men, but endless ridicule of her...

I vas just tryingk to show I hedt some leetle discipline already, since very rudte that I hedt nodt use my int-telleckk-shun to wadtch and sa-vah entire interview like Seder bone (I vant to go to a Seder sometoims, I nevah been invoitedt--one Jewish boy wish me Heppy Easter one toime, I wish him Heppy Passovah because he hedt to go to Seder, he godt offendedt. I thoughdt thedt vas vhat I supposedt to say, then he saidt the foodt nodt goodt either, although I do eat gefilte fish vhen eet eess on sale duringk the season).

I hev been eckt-ting too much like Babs, who claims to be a BAY-gel on a platedt-ful of onion rolls...she toldt mistah Ziegfeldt this...tryingk to coib my tendencies to the off-topic so I don't hev to move outta da buildingk...

To provoke people when I’m asked about racism, I like to do my line I love racism, I can’t imagine my life without racism, there there's no progressive movement now without racism. I’m not crazy…Now comes the preacher part, the real….what do I mean by this is that there is something false about this respectful multiculturalist tolerance…my God, for me political correctness is still inverted racism…let’s cut the crap, let’s say we want to become friends, there has to be a politically incorrect exchange of obscenity. You know, some dirty joke or whatever, whose meaning is “cut the crap we are now real friends”. And I can tell you this from my wonderful experience here, you want a shocking story you will hear it. How did I become here a friend, a true friend, am not advising anybody to do it because it was a risky gesture, but it worked wonderfully with a -with a -with a bleck, African American guy. No? How did I become? We were very friendly, already, but not really, but then I risk and told him, it’s a horrible thing I warn you, is it true that you blacks you know have a big penis, no? but that you can even move it so that if you have on your leg above your knee a fly you can Boff! smash it with your penis. The guy embraced me and told me dying of laughter “now you can call me a nigger.” Like when blacks tell you “you can call me a nigger” means they really accept you no?

This interview also contains the Sara Palin Happily Castrated Feminist routine and other popular zizzling memes; I guess we should be grateful that the zizzlings didn't borrow this as well, though that may be coming soon.

The bleck guy probably laughed as an ironic gesture, a politically incorrect obscenity in order to cut the crap and initiate real friendship.

"'Is it true that you Slovenian celebrity philosophers make money from incoherent splutterings that make lapsed leftists feel they get the reward of entitlement to racism after jumping through the hoops of multi cultural discourse? Is it true you babble this crap at them so that they think you are making some daringly clever point that shows how we must double irony back on itself and actually address us blecks as niggers in order to prove to them our beyond liberal hip credentials as both massively racist AND aware of it at the same time?'

And when I said this, my god, the Slovenian was rolling around the floor laughing (all the way to the bank). He embraced me and offered me a prospectus of courses he would be teaching this term, written on a pastry napkin in blue biro with hefty prices repeatedly crossed out and rewritten in larger amounts.

'Now you can enrol in Birkbeck, just make sure you are not being too, how do you say it, eh, flirty with the giruls eh? I tell you what, I will give you a list of the ones which I am to be harassing this year, and you can be, eh, how do you say it, making love with the other ones yes?'"

There's this strange way in which anti-multiculturalists like Zizek echo the American neoconservatives of the past 10 years or so... I've tried to point this out plenty of times, but usually to no effect...

Try talking to a self-proclaimed neo-con or diehard republican about politics today, and they will inevitably steer the conversation toward how "out-of-control" anti-racism and anti-sexism have become in American culture, how white men have to "walk on egg shells" all of the time, how it's cramping their style to have to remember whether it's bad to say "coloreds" or "wetback" anymore, or to hold themselves back from slapping their secretary's ass.

Oh, and btw- this country is completely losing its Christian heritage! There's no moral grounding anymore- look at all these women, not even getting married before they have kids, dressing like hookers, and taking our jobs (like all of those other special-interest minority groups). I mean, how are we supposed to be able to tell which women are going to be compliant so we'll never have to pay alimony if they all look like whores? Just look at what MTV did to our kids- now our daughters are sexting and having sex, and they don't even seem to feel guilty about it! It's unconscionable.

The only way to get back what's ours is to return to Christian values. (You know, those values that are about everybody but us making sacrifices for the "universal" good.)

Obviously Zizek and co. would never admit to thinking this way, but their points of contention with "liberalism" as they've invented and caricatured it seem to intersect quite frequently with the more extreme segments of the American rightwing's. A lot of this stuff I can imagine coming right out of Glenn Beck's mouth.

This recklesstortuga is very fucked up, but in the Zizekian way it will for some viewers pass itself off as the extraradical antiracism. It's technique is derived from Zizek and Sacha Baron Cohen's characters, with this mobililiy of subjectivity, so that satire morphs into sincerity and into satire of satire in this opportunbistic way, the whome thing flexible and sort of handed to the viewer to twist into the ideological shape the viewer prefers, so the viewer is always validated. It's got an interactive, webby, new media quality in this sense, that the viewer is a "player" constrained and yet able to customise the content, just by the posture of reception, what to treat as ironic, how many degrees of irony to apply, what to treat as asserted "realism" feature of satire and what to treat as the exaggeration, what to treat as the warning and what as the fantasy gratification...when is the protagonist a surrogate hero and when an object anti(hero - all this the player/viewer decides. I think we are now seeing the real impact of the new technologies on the form of content. And as alwayts the medium is the message - the feeling provided to the consumer of liberty, choice, control, of co-authorship, and of "friendshop" - of getting it, of being in cahgoots with the programme - is the paramount ideological effect. Looking at this I can now see clearly how this interactivity and flexibility, this posture on wheels the programme has, appears in a cruder form in The Sopranos, The Wire and Weeds...

Zizek will say anything, of course. He just heard that blacks have big penis, etc., anyway they do sometimes and don't sometimes, they're probably just not 'withdrawn in attitude' if there's any truth to the stereotype, but it's just a crock of shit, and he wanted to do another comedy act. Plus, his comedy acts are always clumsy and awkward and he never researches a fucking thing. It's stunning that such an obvious becoming-dolt (because he didn't always project stupidity in so blatant a way, whether he made it fashionable or discovered it was fashionable I don't know). He just loved the 'whacking a fly with it', of course. Nobody can wield a peenie fast enough to whack a fly, unless they are at high altitudes (I remember at Aspen when I was a teen that the flies were very lethargic, so I guess you could do it that way). Zizek truly is the Gold Standard of Celebrating Dumb Thinking to such degree that even lazy readers like me can't miss it.

So what's the next step? Overtly imitate Rush Limbaugh, be on his show, talk about the new converts? I'm not as worried as you are, ladies, because I think Zizek is pushing the envelope so that he'll be inoperative in no time. His shelf life is very stale bread, you know. He'd need 'le sex appeal', and doesn't have it. And he knows it, too.

certain cultural work is fragile; decades to build, a few years to shatter and destroy.

look at this rubble.

this fantasy of mastering the black man, of using the frightful superiuority of his virility against him, to subdue him, of stealing it, and having him fall to his knees in worship - call me your slave! - and becoming King of All Kafiristan is of course an old routine of Zizek's. In an earlier version

he does explicitly point to Hegel's role in his tale of himself as great Aryan subduing the other and even making off with this magic penis in a sense. He shows it like a trophy. He has it, it becomes the Lacan he uses to "bugger" hegel with.

That's the crudest statement of this fantasy around. But Toscano's tale of Malcolm X repudiating the particularism of black nationalism" agfyer being touched by the laser beam of Hegel's aryan Spirit/Mind, is another version of the same fantasy of becoming King of all Kafiristan, Daddy Warbucks, of overcoming the black man, earning his reevognition of your superiority, his willing subservience, his loyalty, admiration, love.

as great Aryan subduing the other and even making off with this magic penis in a sense. He shows it like a trophy. He has it, it becomes the Lacan he uses to "bugger" hegel with.

But that's what he cannot REALLY do, which is why I reject Dejan's endless virtual fuckings, etc., what Zizek is doing by 'making off with this trophy' requires that you don't still value the 'real thing'. It's my downfall, some would say, that I still do. I've written a lot on the internet, but NOTHING is less satisfying than 'lacanian fucking', so if Zizek thinks he's got that, then he and Dejan do have something in common after all. Anodyne and I have discussed this shit at length and that's why I never talk about anything I do in the sexual realm in the real world AT ALL. Because Zizek is trying to sell his 'cyber-penis', and he has always tried to sell that virtual everything has become the dominant. In THAT, even Ms. Sontag was right: I like her choice of the word a 'vast provincialism' to describe these nerds who think cyber-sex is something. Dejan does this with his fantasies of 'the narcissistic cat' and 'the Egyptian temptress'. This is probably harmless, but it has nothing to do with what some of us think of as real 'social...good times..' etc., even if we have to put up with 'candlelit dining' to get it!

But you're right, Zizek has done his job, he has convinced enormous numbers of people who ought to have at least seen through his shit by 4 years ago, even if not sooner (I thought he was smart as far back as 2002, but that was it.) People are now slowly getting embarassed that they have bought into this fatuous moron who is decomposing before their very eyes. But all this lacanianism is about pain and stealing somebody's dick, etc., you don't have to steal somebody's sex if you have any. And it's a kind of socialism to have sex, you know; it's a way of genuinely communicating with someone else, although it's fun to do it by yourself afterwards, remembering it, or just prolonging it--but not STEALING anything! You just enjoy the company of the other person, no matter what sex, it's not supposed to be a game, although it can be a sport. This seems more frequent among males than females (my difficult roommate, now gone, says she and her girlfriends always kiss, but I don't nearly always with my boyfriends, but that doesn't mean there isn't a lot of tenderness involved, you know. We don't kiss because we think it's 'forbidden', but just because we think it might distract from the more..plangent...and trenchant...sensations...although I don't hate kissing either. I think Zizek doesn't know anything about lovemaking either, but I really don't want to know the details. They sound ominously horrible.

wiht this shifting, shuffling style of satiure, this evasive floating satire, you can't lock it down into "progressive" - it always has something harring. But you can lock it into reactionary. But you have to decide.

It's like that brain teaser with the red and green hats, four guys in a room, or "indian poker". You have to say, okay, let's assume it's progressive and it's intention is to send up racist attitudes. And then okay, now let's assume it's reactionary, and it's intention is to undermine anti-racist critique.

If you do this with zizek, everything always fits perfectly into the reactionary intention, and the progressive or critical left hypothesis will alwayts just mleave a mess. If you assume he means to be a radical leftist or progressive, you have to conclude he's incoherent and stupid and incompetent. If you assume he's a reactionary intent on undermining leftist critique and progressive discourse, he's quite craftsmanlike and competent.

But you have to be a mature reader, a mature consumer, who is capable of putting an interpretation to work, who is capable of deploying an interpretive method in a consistent way according to some decided upon principles. Of course textual interpretation is not a science, but when it's just a free for all, just opportunistic defence of the love object or opportunistic attack of the disliked thing, its childish, and people who do this tend to be superficial as well as erratic and incoherent.

To read Zizek, as to read Ali G, Borat, Bruno, or these reckless tortuga sketches, one needs to be rational in the face of all these promises of pleasure in irrationality. The pomo dogma says reading is "impossible" anyway (because the results are "impure"), so that excuse is in place, but if you resist it, you find that this stuff is shallow and unrewarding as "art" or "theory" or whatever, but very legible, quite knowable, not at all mysterious. There is no infinite irony or infinite ambiguity, there are just childish readers invited to indulge their childishness by products which offer childish pleasures but were made by very canny, knowledgeable and professional adults.

"But you're right, Zizek has done his job, he has convinced enormous numbers of people who ought to have at least seen through his shit by 4 years ago,"

not quite convinced. seduced. most of his fans - those who aren't professional dependent on him, for whom mere venality or fear are enough of an explanation - are addicted to how good he makes them feel about themselves and so they rationalise.

once he said it's unfair to men because they do "all the work" and women just "lie there".

I thought, at first, oh dear oh dear. But then I thought oh he's posing too, this is to appeal to his fans, to win them over to him as their fellow. Because he's seen too many movies - and he always believes movies are reality - to never suspect how unusual that experience is if it is in fact his own.

'once he said it's unfair to men because they do "all the work" and women just "lie there".'

I remember catching that documentary about Zizek on one of the odd channels in the 400s once... and it was remarkable to me just how little effort he made to try to hide his misogynist sensibilities. He rattles off a bunch of stuff about how relationships with women are the ultimate evil (he calls this "love", but in the context of all of the Lacanian talk, it's pretty clear that "love" for him is simply metonymy for heterosexual relations). There was also some romanticism thrown in there, and idealization of "love", some throwing around heterosexual tropes as if, of course, this is how everyone experiences close interpersonal intimacy- as a sort of giant disappointment based on the absolute opacity of the other... but then I think along with that there was another layer of irony overlaid, leading to an infinitely regressive irony, based on his conscious performance of the role of the "tortured" soul... the person who just can't connect with anyone (he describes life on earth feeling for him as if he is a monster or alien while everyone else is normal and therefore inaccessible), someone who is just too neurotic and self-involved to care much about anyone else. And he talks at length and with quite a self-satisfied air about his narcissism, as if it's his good friend (and this is, indeed, how narcissism often works).

I think it's Zizek's detached honesty about his own psychological issues mixed with ironic self-satisfaction that's such a draw for so many people. In this he is perhaps something of a pomo Everyman. It's what Zizek's charisma is made of, something very relatable to a lot of people these days, being trapped in narcissism as a sort of No Exit-esque hell simulation. I'm not a big fan of contemporary American literature, but Zizek seems almost like a character David Foster Wallace might have written. Or maybe David Foster Wallace with a dash of Bret Easton Ellis.

It's ironic again, then, if I'm reading all of this correctly, that vertiginous self-irony and pomo identity slumming are exactly what's being fiercely disavowed by Zizek in his work.

I think there's a mirrored room regressive irony in Zizek's public persona, if not in his writing.

But on the second count I think you're absolutely right, there's definitely no infinite ambiguity there. I think what often saves some of the other superstar intellectuals is their reliance on ambiguity and equivocation- it keeps them from shooting themselves in the foot because they can't be nailed to the wall on many points. Zizek has no such reservations, and far less restraint. So he really fills a void in leftist academic discourse, he's the one who tells the hard truths, who isn't afraid to stick his neck out to say what needs to be said.

Definitely pundit-y, and in line with the whole shift in focus in the new mediascape from information to infotainment.

"of course, this is how everyone experiences close interpersonal intimacy- as a sort of giant disappointment based on the absolute opacity of the other... but then I think along with that there was another layer of irony overlaid, leading to an infinitely regressive irony, based on his conscious performance of the role of the "tortured" soul... the person who just can't connect with anyone (he describes life on earth feeling for him as if he is a monster or alien while everyone else is normal and therefore inaccessible),"

But they're both true that he says, so that he really never does anything but cancel everything out faster than other people. Of course, fucking is all opacity (and ABSOLUTE, which is what he deserves, being the shittiest lover in the world) for him, after all people are totally inaccessible in their comparative normality. He really does talk big for someone so 'not really famous'. I don't think he knows he's not even as well-known as David Fucking Brooks or even Jim Lehrer, and Peter Jennings dead is still a lot more famous.

"It's ironic again, then, if I'm reading all of this correctly, that vertiginous self-irony and pomo identity slumming are exactly what's being fiercely disavowed by Zizek in his work."

Yes and no, because it's all yes and no. Yes, it's ironic, but that doesn't matter much, it's not serious that it's 'ironic'. But he's shrewd as fucking hell, and of course he has to disavow SOME of it, not just shooting himself in the foot, or the act won't keep working. He can't tell people that ALL of his work is 'pure bluff'. Although he might get to that point.

"Zizek has no such reservations, and far less restraint. So he really fills a void in leftist academic discourse, he's the one who tells the hard truths, who isn't afraid to stick his neck out to say what needs to be said."

I'm afraid that, even though he doesn't want anybody to really know that he really is, in a strange way, 'telling the hard truths', through an interestingly hypocritical medium (his ass-mind), they can do so, which we are all three proving. Just because he appeals to a large audience of like-minded (but not quite as facile) ass-minds, doesn't mean he's not profound, except for being totally graceless, which immediately renders him superficial, stupid and like a goddam giant amoeba. He's literally an 'asshole' in the strictest sense of the slang term--which is why he HAS NO ASSHOLE! Yuck, I hate to think what he does have, besides that weasel-face. But he DOES say the hard truths, it's just that the 'Zizek show', as he even calls it, is not quite over, because various followers have got to go and get new job training and maybe report to the Waverly Workfare Depaht-mendt...I swear, at least Babs produced, without meaning to, 'the Streisand Effect', by suing for people shooting her Malibu Mansion. Now everybody knows where it is, and so in her 2006 concert, she said 'We're building a house', I guess this time she won't sue when they photograph it, since that made hundreds of millions of people see it. Now, that's FAME, and Zizek knows that, though.

'If there is a great lesson of the 20th-century history, it's the lesson of psychoanalysis: The lesson of totalitarian subordination is not "renounce, suffer," but this subordination offers you a kind of perverted excess of enjoyment and pleasure. To get rid of that enjoyment is painful. Liberation hurts.'

Hurts whom? The privileged, maybe. And this is what he's really worried about, how now white men might not be able to smoke cigars because of "PC" liberalism out of control, jokes about how those hypersexual and authentic Africans have it right (forget about the role the U.S. government and the RCC played in promoting AIDS genocide in Africa by installing scientifically-proven-to-fail abstinence only programs across the continent), condoms are awful- he can't believe we Western pansies allow ourselves to be talked into using them. Ironically, the socialist position on things like smoking or safe sex would be that it saves laborers and the health care system millions of dollars when citizens stop smoking/practice safe sex. These are public goods worth sacrificing for. But we're to believe the move toward safe sex is some kind of oppressive, invasive set of prohibitions (we'll ignore for now the fact that he just tried to establish that subordination to prohibition offers the most sublime pleasure imaginable, whereas freedom = slavery. So being forced to wear a condom should be right in line with his personal kinks). And again, the question is, for whom? Well, men, most obviously. All the old authentic machismo props are now prohibited, boohoo!

Hurts whom? The privileged, maybe. And this is what he's really worried about, how now white men might not be able to smoke cigars because of "PC" liberalism out of control

Nope. Liberation hurts nobody. If you keep separating off the 'privileged' from the 'not privileged', maybe you've got some trip, I don't buy it. Liberation is a larger idea, and that DOES apply to everyone. You are now bringing up all the 'cigars' and 'white men' thing to the point that it is not really going to be digestible, just because Zizek likes those cliches. In fact, you are both screaming MEN!! MEN!! MEN!! so loudly that even I'm getting fucking tired of it. What do men want? Okay, then stop fucking asking these things and expecting any men at all to hang around. You go too far, and then you wonder why everybody doesn't agree with you, just because they see what a fraud Zizek is.

And I certainly don't care if people 'run off', or if men don't want to hang around, because I'm questioning the implicit assumptions underneath Zizek's brand of rhetoric. (The sooner that's over with the the better, really.)

This is how it often goes, when you look at a text and highlight some of its uglier presuppositions. I don't even think all of this is entirely conscious on Zizek's part, it's just screaming at me from the page when I read his work. And he's made no attempt whatsoever to address any feminist's concerns, so why should I trip over myself being apologetic about this stuff? I mean, in a world where the most depraved violence against women is banal and common, I don't feel much like mincing words.

I'm not trying to imply that you are a chauvinist like Zizek, if that's what you're worried about.

Also, I'm not saying that "machismo" or masculine identities can't be a site for radical transformation in the Deleuzoguattarian sense. Sure, of course they can.

But all too often, 'masculinity' in popular culture is legislated as a reactionary counter-measure to encroaching feminist demands on patriarchal institutions. We can't pretend the grounds of masculinity are uncontested, either, which is what I see happening more and more on the left... a movement away from embracing queer liberation because its too "PC" and multiculturalist and toward gender essentialism because it's "refreshingly honest" and easy.

I already told Arpege I knew that's what she meant. There's a point at which men and women, and male homosexuals and Lesbians have an antagonism. That's all, so don't be surprised if not all men think they don't have to be either chauvinists or male lesbians. Which is what it can sound like if you don't think there is anything between 'anti-PC' and 'queer liberation'.

You ignored my main post about Zizek, which is that he is much simpler than you're letting him be. In another way, you are seeing him just as his followers do: as arresting, compelling, exciting. But it's something that never changes, he's always the same, he always does CANCEL OUT whatever it was he has just said he stood for. He's empty and means to be, because that's what his role is, however and whoever chose that role. I don't see his damage everywhere that you and Arpege do. I do see him as doing exactly what you say he does, but you don't have to 'prove him right' by accidentally over-demonstrating some of the things he doesn't even care about. He doesn't care about any of it, except that his narcissism is an 'important narcissism'. Narcissisms are different, and they do not necessarily preclude interpersonal intimacy. As a 'dom', which you've talked about publicly, you know what I'm saying, and it's admirable that you can take as far as you can. But you can't take it as far as you want.

Oh, you care if people 'run off', not necessarily me. We all do, even Zizek, most likely, he's just trying to be charismatic, and is just doing more of what he's done for many years now, becoming more of what he is. Tout ca change, tout la meme chose (maybe not correct, Arpege can fix the french)

I mean, he uses the oldest adverstising techniques. You sell cigarettes not by denying their danger but by emphasising it in a veiled way, the smoker is brave and daring;, its all about adolescent rebellion - the smoker is no middle class responsible man in grey flannel. Fascism sold itself this way too. And this is his one thing. Sell racism "you look like such a pansy unless you say ngrngrngr!" sell support for imperialism "bush things you're such a pathetic wanker for protesting!" sell himself most of all, the most dangerous philosopher! if you object to me you're just a moralising stereotyoe, and he's roll his hand in the air like they teach lawyers to do in depositions, as if (like kenoma said) to say yes yes heard it all before, sure sure, soccermom recycler organic cook condom-provider-to-teens nader-voter battered-women's-shelter- volunteer...

"Zizek, which is that he is much simpler than you're letting him be. In another way, you are seeing him just as his followers do: as arresting, compelling, exciting. "

well the point is to determine how and why he is this to his followers. How he works - because he works the same as other culture commodities, and he's in a new trend of product that really is having Orwellian effects - the caveman ads anodyne has up are also like this; and Colbert (although that show does have a fixed ground of pov, it works by the same floating posture technique)

Yes, he is a total CHAMELEON, but I don't know enough about his early years, and not even aware of him till around 2000 to know if he ever 'floating-postured' in this very obvious way back then. I definitely think it's gotten much more blatant and screamingly contrived. He's playing it to the hilt and pulling all the stops out. Maybe he's au-ah-di-tion-ingk for the bigck movie pahts...but so 'subtly' that Hollywood doesn't even know that he doesn't realize that you aren't going to get discovered as the New Sweater Girl like that...you have to get a screen test just like everybody else, even if you're jusdt anothah safe onion row-all. I kendt waidt till Tom Cruise gets to say to Zizek "We'll caw-all yew...for the Scientology Update Video if we need yew..."

Actually, I don't think Zizek is "damaging" in any broad sense. Even in his celebrity, his brand of leftism has limited reach when it comes to grass roots political movements. I'm mostly just disappointed that he's the most well-known and celebrated voice of the left at the moment. I think the things he's saying are laughably stupid and should be transparently off-base to Marxists.

"As a 'dom', which you've talked about publicly, you know what I'm saying"

No, I really don't know what you're saying. I do not identify as a "dom" (it would be domme), either, but that's neither here nor there.

This is always the way though. When women object to the status quo, or to whatever is taken to be business as usual- with just their voices, no fists, no weapons, no violence, even from the privacy of their own homes on blogs- they could only possibly be doing this to usurp or "dominate" or "hate" men. (There are all kinds of scientific studies that demonstrate that when women voice their opinions about something concrete, these are personalized and attributed to their personal weaknesses, whereas when men express their opinions, people tend to externalize and depersonalize, attributing them to objective, rational reactions). When men routinely trample over others left and right, going on killing and raping sprees, and then insist that feminists are just man hating harpees, most people just shrug because they're doing what's 'natural'. I mean surely you don't think things like violence and the subordination of women are straightforwardly natural and part of what it inevitably means to be male?

I realize you're not very interested in politics, or a feminism, but you must have noticed these patterns at some point, no? I'm not sure if I know what you're talking about when you say there's "antagonism" between lesbians and gay men. I can't speak for lesbians, since I'm not one, but many of my friends are lesbians and gay men who get along very well and have common goals. Maybe the antagonism is stronger in your generation.

"I mean, he uses the oldest adverstising techniques. You sell cigarettes not by denying their danger but by emphasising it in a veiled way, the smoker is brave and daring;, its all about adolescent rebellion - the smoker is no middle class responsible man in grey flannel."

This reminds me, have you seen Mad Men? There are a couple of scenes in the first season where they discuss how to market cigarettes given the growing evidence that they're harmful...they consult a German psychoanalyst, and she tries to tell them that they will be able to sell them even better if they're harmful, because of the death drive. And then the ad men all roll their eyes and tell her she's a nutso crazy intellectual just making stuff up- then go right ahead and make the tobacco companies millions of dollars basically by (unwittingly?) coopting her ideas.

one thing about it - my dad was in that world at that time; Doyle Dane and Bernbach. I have lots of stories about it, and photos

these people were having fun. this is what's most wrong - in the sense of innaciurate - about Mad Men. They have this grim doomladen feeling, our own mood. That was not the case then - they were optimistic, upwardly mobile people who felt society and humanity were on a roll (nazis - defeated. segregation - defeated. mccarthy - defeated. and elgin baylor took the game to the air!)

and they were much more cultured in that world than these people. they read and talked about arthur miller, richard wright, lillian helman, tom wolfe. they loved music and clothes and art and sports. and fire island, and travel to europe. and they partied - not in this grim way on the show, like everything is a consolation or medication.

"No, I really don't know what you're saying. I do not identify as a "dom" (it would be domme), either, but that's neither here nor there."

Then I don't know what you've been talking about in your descriptions of things to me about BDSM, and if you're going to be coy about it, I also don't give a fucking shit. I didn't say 'identified', I said you'd 'you-know-whattted', and I think that's on the bleugs, not just in private email.

"This is always the way though. When women object to the status quo, or to whatever is taken to be business as usual- with just their voices, no fists, no weapons, no violence, even from the privacy of their own homes on blogs- they could only possibly be doing this to usurp or "dominate" or "hate" men.'

So I'm glad you explained it to yourself, because I think it quite natural for one's 'professional domme', as it were, to colour and become part of the persona when you're not 'doin' da business'. I think that's fine, I'm just tellin' ya, you and Arpege agree str8 down party lines on goddam EVERYTHING, but there's a point at which you gotta realize that things like 'feminism-masculism debates' and 'debates on race' do include both sides, and these include the traditional one identified as the OPPRESSOR. Otherwise, just be "A Coupla White Chicks Talkin' and Hopin' some Male Lesbians Will Accept You Noblesse Oblige about Transformational Machismo". (We do appreciate your business. If you have forgotten to send in your last payment, will you please send this payment in immediately, so that you can help us not ask for a deposit worth over two months' average billing? If you have sent your payment, please disregardt this notice. Love, Con Edison.)

"(There are all kinds of scientific studies that demonstrate that when women voice their opinions about something concrete, these are personalized and attributed to their personal weaknesses, whereas when men express their opinions, people tend to externalize and depersonalize, attributing them to objective, rational reactions). When men routinely trample over others left and right, going on killing and raping sprees, and then insist that feminists are just man hating harpees, most people just shrug because they're doing what's 'natural'. I mean surely you don't think things like violence and the subordination of women are straightforwardly natural and part of what it inevitably means to be male? "

Oh please, you should be totally embarassed to ask me such shit. I just DO NOT READ THIS FORMULA INTO EVERY GODDAM MOMENT OF LIFE. You apparently do, and it seems Arpege is really getting revved up to get on the goddam bandwagon too! Oh, man, you two are just too much sometimes. I think you even claimed to be Jewish, too, didn't you, and you turn out to be Italian or something? Hell, Arpege, and the reason that guy godt offendedt that I said 'Happy Passover' was because he thought I was supposed to say 'Happy Easter' to him too, although I didn't know that, since he was just about to go out to the dreaded Seder in Rock-kville Cen-tuh...

And as for you two WHITE CHICKS SITTIN' AROUN' TALKIN', let me remind you that it comes across as fucking MANIA to do nothing but decide all privilege is 'white male supremacist', and not want to run me off (while saying you don't care, well, maybe you don't, you coupla white chicks..), as if that were the only kind of privilege, and any 'privileged woman' is also a 'male white supremacist worshipper', like, say, Beyonce, who, I'm sure, has had many good times with whatever she has wanted, and I hope to get in good enough shape for it myself. When we're fully involved in coitus, I'm going to whisper 'Beyonce, did you hear about da coupla white chicks and what dey're up to now?' and she'll say 'Keep ya mind on the bizznezz...'

And Arpege thinks she is no longer privileged as a well-to-do upper-middle-class New York Parisian because she kendt smoke in moderation and she thinks I am a prviliched whidte male because I haven't hedt a cigaredtte today. Thet iss the only reason Arpege stoppedt smokingk, she wanted a true physical sense of lack of privilege and she couldn't give up beingk an opera goeur...

Well, we know that since 2008, all sorts of wall Street yuppies had to move down from shitty million dollar condoes to ones you only paid $50,000 for a bad view on West End Ave., so yeah, if you mean that, by that, the 'privileged' suffer. If it makes you feel any better, I didn't want to spend the money to gedt my DVD slot on the computah fixed, so I can now only watch vhs's again. I have LOST SOME PRIVILECHES...

I'm sorry, girls, oi am in too goodt a moodt to gedt upsedt with youse. I suggest you call up the Dworkin specialists, you know how understanding they are of all violence done to women, and how their technical know-how is applied to aid and abet this anti-violence done to women.

xxx

The one detail I noticed was jokes about 'not using condoms'. I wonder if zizek did this overtly, that always has to be explicated, because if people are not very multiple in their fucking, and have been tested, they need not use condoms when they wish to enjoy the pleasures of Sodomy. I wouldn't have thought even he would equate using condoms with 'lack of masculinity', but he does seem fairly redneck to me, and the problem is that he seems to pass for sophisticatedt (or that's one problem.) I always use them for important sodomies, and I still think you are not focussing on the Forest for the Trees with Zizek: You're probably right about all the details, but he's basically just an empty, but very shrewd nerd who knows how to do the Wizard of Oz. But leninino may still like him, for all I know. In that case, you are understandably between a rock and a hard place.

Didn't you say you your bleug that you liked men and women, and that you maybe preferred men by just a bit, or something like that. That was when you and Dejan were talking about your bf's cock, i think.

Well, sometimes they do not have an antagonism, sometimes it is all peace and light and yes, some real understanding of not being heterosexual in the same way, but the business of sex itself is where they find fear and loathing sometimes.

'Frustrated Music Teacher' Sez:

kamakamakamakamakamakamakameleon

Arpege, I think it's 'kamakamakamakamakamele-unnnn'.

'Frustrated music teacher' was term given me and Dominic by Dejan and Unnameable Cult Nerd.

After all, Miss Stein said people had it all wrong, that they always said it was 'A rose is a rose is a rose', and she said no, it's 'A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose'. So here, we have proven there is no antagonism at times between lesb'ans and fag-gits.

You must remember that once Arpege was even more hung up on purity of revolution than she was for a long time (she may have changed back), and said she couldn't talk to some people because they were racists and sexists. Somebody said 'well, okay, Greta Garbo'. So Arpege has been a Woman with a More Ecumenical Mission ever since, but I don't know how the problems with leninino and Ms. Power and now even Badiou-bashing seems to be becoming the new rage Chez Arpege. Well, you'll just have to kill all us White Supremacist Privileged Males that Just Smoked One Cigarette, thank you though.

i'm not rilly bashing Badiou i just can't picture any leftist who would make finkielkraut look even like he had a point for half a second, and badiou manages this because he really is a chavinist and it comes through. he really is one of these guys who says okay we invgented everything good - we white french men.? and you women, you were never our equals, but you could be if you come and ask us nicely. and when we say "fuck off, we don't want to join your universe" he says "well you're a nazi whore". and then he returns to his nice chat with alain finkielkraut.

"she couldn't talk to some people because they were racists and sexists"

well no not not talk to them, but not organise a campaign against a landlord with them. i thought they couldn't be trusted and would just ruin everything. which actually turned out to be true to a point - they couldn't be trusted - but the thing would have gone nowhere if everyone in the buildings had not been able to cooperate despite the racism of some.

in NY anyway, there's a big difference between the kind of white supremacy/racism common among Dominicans and that among Puerto Ricans and among Haitians none is like those scawee crackers down there where you come from.

in NY anyway, there's a big difference between the kind of white supremacy/racism common among Dominicans and that among Puerto Ricans and among Haitians none is like those scawee crackers down there where you come from."

Don't I know it, and it seems so weird that Ms. Palin is just like that--almost KKK, or maybe literally is, I wouldn't put it past her--but I think Alaska was just so Twilight Zone to have to be thinking about for 3 or 4 months, that we decided we could even do without Cindy McCain's Charity Drug Addiction...it would have been a Lovely Socialite Subjectivity to profit from, but we bit da bullet, even though all NYTimes is tel-lingk-kus today thedt Obama kendt learn how to quit beingk whidte.

Don't say words like 'Dominican' and 'Puerto Rican' to me, you know I go weak in the knees immediately, and I'm sure 'Haitian' would do it too if I ever got an opportunity. 'Blatino' is even TOO GOOD, oh man, that can be, like, uh, addictive. That time I almost went to Port-au-Prince in 1995 (even had the ticket and talked to the Holiday Inn there) I sometimes reflect on, and still have some of the brochures, but this girl from St. Lucia at my workplace at the time told me I'd probably get sick, and I had really wanted to go to Ville Bonheur, where there's the Sacred Vodoun Waterfall, that's about 3 hard hours by jeep. So there's difference made among all those people too, as you've pointed out the differences between Dominican Republic and Haiti (although why Haiti then gets the earthquake I don't think can be explained by magicalisms of any kind.) Carmen, this St. Lucia girl, lived in Brooklyn here and the Haitian woman in her building once hung raw chicken legs on the doors of all the tenants, including Carmen's. Carmen and I were always making out at the office, she was perfectly gorgeous, not one drop of white blood and these amazing beautiful teeth, I still have a photo of her.

So naturally the conversation goes like this:

Patrick: 'Well, had the chicken legs gone bad and spoiled?'

Carmen? 'No, they were still good, so I guess you could have just gone ahead and cooked it'.

"and it comes through. he really is one of these guys who says okay we invgented everything good - we white french men.? and you women, you were never our equals, but you could be if you come and ask us nicely. and when we say "fuck off, we don't want to join your universe" he says "well you're a nazi whore". and then he returns to his nice chat with alain finkielkraut.

who is this helping?"

Lustmolch, I guess. I remember maybe 4 years ago there were those talks with Zizek and Badiou.

Well, you know, the Deep South Crackers are, except in the cities or in the old-money smaller places, extreme racists because they were, after the Civil War, exactly on the economic level of the blacks--that's a weird kind of equality, I know, but since there's no brains there, they weren't part of the ruling class in any way, so that maybe skin colour was obviously something primitive to fixate on. W.J. Cash, in 'The Mind of the South', was talking about this teetering balance between the blacks and the poor whites, and the blacks would get revenge on the whites' epithets by calling them 'cotton mill trash'. Poor W.J. He was a kind of martyr, but some of his assessments were incorrect, and you only find that out by going to New Orleans, which is a true singular culture that exists nowhere outside the South. The more purely decorative towns like Charleston and Savannah are not enough to prove anything culturally, although I'd like them for a few days. Le Monde (replete with Frenchmen) said Savannah was the most beautiful city in North America', and then there was that book by John Berendt, which was hugely popular and not at all strong.)

Since my family background and personal life are so fascinating, let's get this correct: My mother's father was from Italy, her mother was from Denmark, I have family in both countries. My father is Jewish, mostly as a vague culture identification (his parents are French Canadian, originally from Quebec by way of Eastern Europe) since he does not practice and nobody in his family does. So no, I do not go to synagogue every week, I had no huge bat mitsvah celebration, but in reform Judaism you're Jewish if your dad is. My boyfriend is also Jewish-by-dad, but doesn't really wear a Star of David and yarmulke. (I know, I know, confusing! How could someone be Jewish AND Italian? My boyfriend is somehow German and Jewish, too- nuts! I even have a friend who is Jewish and from an Italian family that's lived in Egypt for decades. Crazy New Yorkers.) I am also bisexual. "Bisexuals" aren't lesbians, fyi, although this seem abundantly clear only to bisexuals. It seems to really confound a lot of otherly oriented people, for reasons I'll probably never understand.

And yes, how uncouth of me, to mention the fact that around a third of the world's female population is raped in their lifetimes, many of them repeatedly and with no legal recourse. I can think of several people in my family who were, many of my friends have been. But how dare people even mention it in passing? If they do, once or twice, in a comments thread on feminism and its role in left discourse, they are clearly just making things up to focus on all of the time... or to "read into every formula of life"... yeah, speaking of Rush Limbaugh...

But it's nice to have my cred reinforced like this. I mean, of all people, I'm usually the one getting yakked at because I'm not hard enough on patriarchy and things like porn, men's culture, male institutions. I'm usually being accused of being too apologetic for this shit, because not focusing on anorexia and "hypersexuality" is defending male privileges...

But there it is, you can be anything to anybody. I'm like the inkblot test of blog feminism.

I did see the news about the Israeli woman who was lied to and then tried to press charges for rape. It really is a good illustration of what we've been talking about, I think, and of what bell hooks meant when she talked about needing to look at the intersectionality of privilege, racism, classism, white supremacy, patriarchy. There's no one simple lens to use in examining what's going on there- you've got it all- there's some element of male entitlement going on (the lying for sex), but then there's racism, ethnic conflict, playing into the woman's distaste for Arab men, at the same time, there's the social pressure on her, because she'd be alienated from her community for voluntarily having sex with an Arab and enjoying it, or not accusing him of rape. There are probably class issues as well, although I haven't seen much written about that element. Then the story itself feeds into American prejudice, due to the pro-Israeli contingent over here, etc.

I think what a lot of people do when someone brings up privilege is get all upset, and think feminists are only about calling out men for having it. But it's feminists, of anybody, who've been most successful at looking at all kinds of privilege, class, race, gender, etc., and how they work together and feed off one another.

If you ever want to read a good introduction to feminism, Patrick, because here you're getting banter and snark, you should read Gerda Lerner's "The Creation of Patriarchy". It's a pretty good historical account that admits male and female agency in the creation of patriarchy without blaming anybody in particular, and emphasizes the importance of self-determination without ignoring class...which not many people have managed to do. If you're not afraid of magically transforming into a lesbian, it's worth a try...

Yeah, I saw the Lerner refernce in that article just a second after I posted that.

It's funny, I haven't thought about that book in years, or about Lerner, and then yesterday I happened on something by her...another college fav. I want to read the Walker book that's referenced, I still haven't.

Bisexuals can be defined as both heterosexual and homosexual. I mean--I can do this even though I am a black lesb'an and have no rights. You were decrying lesb'ans by saying you 'can't speak for them', when you certainly can if you are a practising female2femaleist de temps on temps.

When I was with my girlfriends, that was my heterosexual side even though I'm not as bisexual as you seem to be. And I haven't found that long-term relationships with women are as easy to do as with men that can be more just 'playing it cool', so I imagine that I am a confirmed old roue. Yes, I prefer not to have to do so much high-maintenance, and my bfs. are the same way.

Oh yeah, I remember your saying your bf. and your father were Jewish, no big deal. I just wandtedt you dto realize the importance of absoludte factual accuracy if you want to transform society while allowing machismo to flower!

Therefore, you have to realize that, as a bisexual, I am goingk to take the liberty to see you as a homosexual if it benefits my subjectivity.

Everybody's ethnic background is interesting, don't knock it. I like all of it, I know that one of the worst is Pitcairn Islanders, but at least I know all about them, whereas I know little of Antarcticans.

Of course, I do know that everything worthwhile has been created by Anglo-Saxon and Frenchman, although Badiou doesn't think this, you know, because remember, he's got that adopted Muslim son, either African or Arab, that's a while back, he was pestered by police when Arpege was out in the banlieue protesting and organizing pipples and bringing car-burners into her flat for Sterno Hot Lunch Takeout, just like Judy Holliday's father before she became a chorine (what divine word that is, it's sort of amazing that there never has been a B'way show called 'Chorine', as 'Chorus Line' is not all it's cracked up to be, and Michael Douglas was not that great in the movie, and Alyson Reed was really awful on 'What I Did for Love'. Marvin Hamlisch did a show based on 'Some Like it Hot' back in early 00's, I heard the score, it wasn't bad at all.

I think Anodyne read about the wonderful episode of 'Mad Men' that Frank Rich slummed with last night. The most implausible scenario I ever heard, and thoroughly stupid idiotic. If you want to talk about how large percentages of your friends got raped, you don't have to dress up for it, but if you do, don't blame it on the adman for not thinking that was really the time or the place.

The rest of the piece seemed sound about Ms. Sherrod, although it seemed more reportage, but he's good that way. Dowd's was just as good, I hope that's get Arpege started, she's always at her worst when she gets going about Maureen Dowd. Well, it certainly was a turn of events, but I hadn't been following anything but whether the new oil well cap was still holding during the week, so Rich's piece served for that.

But that girl was 'dressing up' to insult the adman more than she was to make her point about somebody from old summer camp days. The whole scene is one of the most stupid-ass things I ever heard of. But I certainly could see you doing that at some point, you do get all fierced-up for a non-Lesbian.

So, Anodyne, if you think that first paragraph that Rich reported about 'Mad Men' was acceptable behaviour on the sexy girl's part, you might as well tell me and save us BOTH some time. If you don't know how to behave in sassiety, then you will have to stay outside of sassiety as I define it. I am not interested in having a bad time just so you can dress up and get on yo' goddam soapbox.

"I can think of several people in my family who were, many of my friends have been. But how dare people even mention it in passing?"

Yeah, right out of the Rich paragraph. Really grotesque that you think I would mean you shouldn't mention it, anyway you know perfectly well we've talked about these things. But maybe you can go back to your cyber-affair, because we are not amused with your Rush Limbaugh inference. You can take that job and shove it.

On the other hand, interesting that you've had a number of family members and friends who've been raped. I can't think of anybody in my family, either side including extended. Of friends, frankly I can't think of anybody either, although this may be exceptional, I'm frankly wondering why I can't think of any. The girls I know in NY would have certainly told me if they had, not kept it to their galpals. Maybe I just don't go to the right 'groups' to hear this kind of thing come up, and no, I'm not going to start. And as for this:

"If you ever want to read a good introduction to feminism, Patrick, because here you're getting banter and snark, you should read Gerda Lerner's "The Creation of Patriarchy". "

No thank you, as I said, I have to spend a lot of time with Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and Blatinos, and well, you know, we all have our bisexual relationships to attend to. For example, when I'm fucking one of my boyfriends, I say to him, 'we are such bisexuals, now, aren't we?' Of course, it could be different for women bisexuals, maybe they remain bisexuals even when they are indulging in homosexual acts.

I really think you should get back to the dworkinists, now that you've proved your the inkblot of bleug feminists. To be fair, you're perfectly okay, you're just not used to my sense of humour the way Arpege is (not that she likes it either, even though I do try to curb some of the worst excesses here from what it is elsewhere.)

Well, I figured some of what you were saying was a joke, but you have no idea how serious some people are when they assume that any woman who doesn't fall in line must do so out of sexual preference for women. (Doesn't assuming that any opinionated or political woman is a "lesbian" pretty much reinforce the notion that heterosexuality is based on the subordination of women to men? So that the heterosexuals are the ones who put up and shut up...)

No, see, I don't have "homosexual" relations with women, then "heterosexual" relations with men. I'm always bisexual, no matter who I'm having relations with.

Make sense? I realize that everybody interprets sexuality through the lens of their own preferences to some extent, and so when monosexuals (or whatever you'd call a group that includes homo and heterosexuals) try to understand bisexuality, they often can only frame it in familiar terms (homo and/or hetero). But I assure you, the majority of people who identify as bisexual are always that way. It's not two like sides, so that one can 'disappear' when an attractive woman walks in the room, or when an attractive man is in the vicinity.

I like that theory well-enough, and I'm sure it's even true that I'm always bisexual even when I'm with guys, because there hasn't been a 'role' or 'position' I haven't enjoyed, and don't think of it as 'male' or 'female'. You make a bigger deal about these nomenclatures than I do. I don't care if when I fuck women it's 'heterosexual in a bisexual', or when I fuck guys it's 'homosexual in a bisexual', but then I'm not involved in movements about these things. It probably seems like a pose, and maybe it is, but I didn't grow up 'red diaper' like Arpege, and we all are somewhat like what we grew up with, and who the fuck cares if somebody else disapproves. I don't do 'politics' or 'philosophy' either one the way some do, because I've got other things to do (unless the theorists and philosophers have decided that there is nothing 'unpolitical', but I haven't got time to think about how I ought to adopt other people's thought patterns and rigid dogmas.

Has anyone else noticed that people are now throwing around the term "counter-consensual" with reference to social and political matters, without defining what this means but implying that it is A Good Thing.

So does anyone know- what is this supposed to mean? Over the past year or so I've seen blog writers insinuate that all of our problems are based on people ridiculously respecting "consent" as a bare-minimum standard for ethical participation, but my immediate reaction to what I've seen is that this is shallow and stupid and, like a lot of buzz words, probably a Zizekism doesn't mean much.

"Has anyone else noticed that people are now throwing around the term "counter-consensual" with reference to social and political matters, without defining what this means but implying that it is A Good Thing.

So does anyone know- what is this supposed to mean? Over the past year or so I've seen blog writers insinuate that all of our problems are based on people ridiculously respecting "consent" as a bare-minimum standard for ethical participation, "

I haven't noticed this - scary, but with all these white "leftists" are getting into zizzzy's fantasy of sexually assaulting black people with impunity - oh yes boss i love it! - and the slut pillory, wouldn't be surprised if this is now put forward from those circles as the hottest newest bestest thing.

"And the tendency from those especially close to those of orthodox Sunni Islam and the integrationist perspective of Alex Haley, who was the coauthor of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, is to frame Malcolm as a kind of evolving integrationist. Well, clearly, that’s just false. Malcolm was a committed internationalist at the end of his life, but he was also a black nationalist, in the sense that he fought for and died for the concept of self-determination for the people of African American descent in this continent and fought for the right of that population to determine for itself what it wished to become. But what I find in my own research is greater continuity than discontinuity."